Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The first blogger arrested in America was Daniel Aljughaifi, “for terrorism”. Yep. As in training with Al Qaeda. I’m pretty cool with his getting arrested.Second? Jack McClellan. They give the reason for that as “For posting pictures of little girls, being a pedophile”. Great! Enjoy prison!Third is a little more complicated, but not too much. Josh Wolf, “For videotaping a burning police car.” Yeah, not quite. He was arrested for refusing to turn over his video of a burning police car to a grand jury in a criminal investigation. Not quite the same thing. In any case, judging from Wolf’s sideburned hipster-doofus picture I support his arrest on a count of aggravated pretension.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed"[3] or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.[3]The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple Web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader" or an "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91).

in my own words..

its somthing that will atoumatically update you and what you assign it...i dont know.

Concern about student safety in the online environment continues to be an issue worldwide. In my previous post I referred to the tension between the responses of moral fear and digital faith. It appears that the proliferation of social networking sites and applications is a key driver of this.This morning I've been reading report from the US National School Boards Association (pdf download) titled "Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking" that reports ninety-six percent of U.S. students ages 9 to 17 who have internet access use social-networking technology to connect with their peers, and one of their most common topics of discussion is education. Not surprising in a way, since the report also finds that nearly all of the school districts surveyed (96%) say that at least some of their teachers assign homework that requires Internet use to complete.Meanwhile, an article on the Wall Street Journal reports on a study found users of the Facebook social-networking site are too gullible in giving up personal information, which could make them the targets of identity theft. The researchers fabricated a Facebook profile and asked 200 Facebook users at random to give up personal information. Out of the 200 friend requests, Sophos received 82 responses, with 72% of those respondents divulging one or more e-mail address; 84% listing their full date of birth 87% providing details about education or work; 78% listing their current address or location; 23% giving their phone number; and 26% providing their instant messaging screen name.All of which suggests to me that our efforts must go into an educating our students (and our teachers!) about what is appropriate behaviour online - rather than adopting the fear perspective and attempting to isolate them from it